The Death of the Internet Community
Or, Why LiveJournal Was, and Always Will Be, the Best Blogging Platform
I’m tired of the internet. It’s had a good run. There have been definite highlights. That video of those two cats chatting with each other? Priceless. But for the most part, I’m over it. Or to be more accurate, I’m weary of it.
I’ve been using the internet for most of my life, although for much of those early years I was just using it to look up Sailor Moon pictures. But around the time I was 13 and actually legally allowed to post on most websites, I made my first email address and signed up for LiveJournal.
Most people my age who I’ve asked also a had LiveJournal (or a similar old-school blog like Xanga), and most of them, like me, would like it if nobody ever, ever found those accounts. LiveJournal was where we had our embarrassing internet puberties. We laughed. We cried. We posted our “what anime cat girl are you?” Quizilla results. We commented on our friend’s journals, and built little internet friend circles. And as we matured, and the internet matured with us, we grew out of it, and migrated to different blogging platforms.
For the most part, people I know went to Twitter and Tumblr. When I first joined Tumblr around 2010, it was a totally new blogging experience for me. I had never been on a site where it was acceptable (or indeed, a fundamental function of the website) to copy someone else’s blog post directly onto your blog. At first, I was very hesitant to use the reblog function. Instead, I would post original content every few days — snippets about my life, photographs, doodles of original characters. However, as I got used to the site, I started to reblog some pictures (as story inspiration for those original characters of mine). Then I started reblogging pictures of other people’s characters. Then I just reblogged things that were pretty.
My original content was gradually replaced by content other people had made. I went from a creator to a curator. At some point in that process, the strange hesitance I first felt at the thought of reblogging someone else’s post, I started to feel when I thought of making my own original post. My individual voice had disappeared with my original content, and it seemed intrusive to suddenly reintroduce it out of nowhere.
I started to feel like I’d regressed. When I was in primary school, I used to spend my time on the internet admiring other people’s pretty pictures. Now, in university, I spent much of my time on the internet… admiring other people’s pretty pictures.
It shouldn’t have to be like this. In so many ways, the internet is bigger than it was back in the early 2000s, and there are more ways to create and share. There’s Patreon and Kickstarter and IndieGogo for funding artists’ endeavors. There are sites like Medium for getting your ideas out to a wider audience. More people have access to the internet than ever before. It seems like every article on every website has at least four different types of share button.
In fact, there are so many things now that you can do with the internet, that sometimes it’s hard to tell what you should (or shouldn’t) do.
If someone makes a post about a certain issue, and someone shares it/reblogs it/retweets it with a comment about a separate issue, we generally say that they’re derailing. “Make your own post,” they’re told.
Now, there are absolutely times when a person is just derailing because they’re angry at what’s being discussed, and they want the discussion shut down. But what if someone reads something, is reminded of a similar or correlated situation, and wants to share it? Are they adding to the conversation, or are they derailing and distracting?
Back in the days of LiveJournal, it didn’t feel like such a problem. The main blog post was obviously the main topic, so if you said something a bit different in the comments, and people didn’t feel like it contributed, they could ignore you. If your intention really was to contribute and not to derail, you could make the solitary comment and leave it at that. The traditional blog commenting system was much more low stakes, and much more conducive to a varied conversation.
As we’ve grown away from blogging systems like LiveJournal, we’ve lost two functions which are fundamental to building communities on the internet: that structured comment system, and the space to just talk about yourself and your life, with no greater agenda.
Tumblr’s reblog system means following a conversation is practically impossible on popular posts, because you have to sift through thousands of notes to find people’s comments. Since each comment is technically a new post of its own, so it’s hard to tell if someone is reblogging a post for the original commentary or something someone added later.
Twitter only allows for one singular thread of conversation. Even if there are multiple people replying to multiple replies, branching out in a sort of a web, it’s only possible to view one thread at a time.
Reddit retains a solid commenting system, but it’s not a blogging site. While it’s still possible to form communities amongst subreddits, the ability to just talk about oneself/one’s life/one’s interests and invite others to join in at their leisure is limited if present at all. Reddit feels much like the ProBoards forums which were so ubiquitous in the early 2000s, but at least on these forums everyone had a profile, and in that profile, they could have a link to a personal website… Often, a LiveJournal.
Facebook, which recently implemented a nested system of commenting, is perhaps the closest to the old blogging days of LiveJournal. But unlike LiveJournal, Facebook uses your real name and your real face, and is often checked by potential employers, making expression there a lot more restrictive than other blogging sites. And, ironically, just as happened with LiveJournal, many people my age are growing away from using Facebook.
I’m not saying I want everyone to return to LiveJournal. If I never had to see that creepy 404 goat face again, it would be too soon.
I’m just lamenting how difficult it is to build personal relationships and internet communities nowadays. I’m lamenting an internet where I am no longer expected to create casually, but rather, to create virally, for as many shares as possible, or not to create at all.
I’m lamenting an internet which makes it easier to endlessly, mindlessly consume others’ work, without ever getting to know them, without any easily found space for a voice of one’s own in the conversation.
